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While the OFFICE of President remains in highest regard at NewEnergyNews, this administration's position on climate change makes it impossible to regard THIS president with respect. Below is the NewEnergyNews theme song until 2020.

While death spiral predictions run rampant, and power companies across the country bicker with solar installers over rate design, a whole new way for utilities to get the most out of distributed energy resources is taking shape in California.

Clean Coalition’s Community Microgrid Initiative could be what utilities want for themselves, their ratepayers and their communities. Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, Public Service Electric & Gas, and the City of Palo Alto Municipal Utility are already on board.

The way DERs are done today is backwards because it starts with a single resident or business that wants to install distributed generation, explained Clean Coalition Programs Director Greg Thomson.

“If a utility wants to move to the Utility 2.0 utility-of-the-future model,” he said, “it looks at the distribution grid as an asset and the local generation as an opportunity to shift from mostly centralized technologies to 25% to 30% local renewables. To do that, the utility looks at the system rather than a bunch of one-offs.”

The Community Microgrid Initiative begins with a DER survey of the local renewables potential. It is combined with input about the utility’s distribution system to identify the highest level of distributed generation that can be readily interconnected without disrupting the power flow or requiring equipment upgrades. Finally, the renewable energy nonprofit performs a financial analysis that optimizes for costs and benefits.

“That makes it possible to get the maximum level of DG into a community that makes sense operationally and financially,” Thomson said. “Storage can be added as needed.”

The test case

Clean Coalition pioneered the concept and methodology for its Community Microgrid Initiative on a single PG&E substation area in San Francisco's Hunters Point community.

“We got 25% of the energy in the model from 50 MW of new local solar without any voltage issues or back-feeding because our Solar Siting Surveyallowed us to find the optimal locations for solar, the best rooftops and parking lots, based on the local grid characteristics,” Thomson said.

Clean Coalition projected benefits over the hypothetical 20 year life of the 50 MW of new PV and concluded it would be cost competitive on a per-MWh basis with a comparable addition of natural gas capacity. But, it would keep $260 million otherwise spent for the plant and fuel in the community and avoid $80 million in transmission costs and $30 million in power interruptions.

It would also save San Franciscans 15 million gallons of water per year and offer $200 million in community economic impacts, $10 million for site leases, and $100 million in local wages for 1,700 job-years of local employment, according to Clean Coalition.

More recently, SCE asked Clean Coalition to do a survey of its two substationPreferred Resources Pilot (PRP) area. It is, SCE reported, a transmission‐constrained area of the utility’s service territory “directly influenced by the closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in 2013.”

The multi‐year pilot is aimed at exploring the use of “preferred resources” — energy efficiency, demand response, renewables, and energy storage — to meet load and reduce the need for new conventional generation. It also targets, according to the utility, “informing the development of the grid of the future.”

They did a rigorous assessment of rooftops in the area, using Google Earth so they could “see the roofs from the top,” Thomson said. It was a deliberate, block by block study. Google Earth tools allowed them to calculate the square footage of each roof.

“We looked at the size, shape, and clutter of each rooftop and parking lot in the area and characterized them as capable of hosting a high, medium, or low density of solar panels,” Thomson said.

They double checked with local solar developers on assumptions like watts per square foot for the different types of roofs, Thomson explained, because software tools like Helioscope and SolView, designed to streamline such assessments, “are not there yet” for this purpose.

SCE provided an overlay of its feeder system in the area so they could estimate feeder proximity at each site. That is very important, Thomson explained, because if a location’s feeder access is complicated the cost and time of obtaining an interconnection goes up.

They identified more than 160 MW of new solar PV technical potential on rooftops, parking garages, and parking lots in the PRP area. SCE published the findings to allow developers to see where the best opportunities are.

SCE did not ask for the DER optimization or the cost-benefit analysis that would normally follow the Solar Siting Survey, Thomson said. And the utility also did not ask for the local potential of other DERs. “Solar will always be a part of it but every community is going to have a different local DG mix,” Thompson said.

Optimization would include consideration of the local load, its shape, and its peaks.

“We marry that grid profile with the DG opportunity to get to how much DG can be supported with little cost," he said.

When possible, Clean Coalition’s assessment would also include not only feeder proximity but available feeder capacity. That information strongly influences which sites are selected as optimal.

SCE asked what PPA rates would attract developers, Thomson said, and that comes down to how easy it is to connect the site to the grid.

“If a high potential solar site’s feeder is at capacity, it will be harder to add,” he explained. “The interconnection process can be costly in dollars and in time so any project that looks easy will get pursued first.”

The cost for Clean Coalition’s analyses depends on the area the utility wants surveyed and the level of detail it wants. “The methodology is very specific and there is no guesswork,” Thomson said. “What drives the cost is what area we are looking at and how deep we are going.”

Utilities can use this kind of analysis to drive renewables growth in their communities, to develop their own systems and sites, or to build community shared solar, Thomson said. Clean Coalition recently worked with the City of Palo Alto’s municipal utility to identify viable sites for solar on city-owned parking structures and helped structure their RFP.

“That kind of community benefit is a small example of what a utility can and should do,” he said.

About 30 MW of the commercial-industrial solar in the Hunters Point system was interconnected at the PG&E substation so the generation could be shared with other customers on other feeders that also connected at that substation.

“It is a community solar model done from the broader system view and from the utility view,” Thomson said. “Any local Target or Wal-Mart or storage facility or shopping center could benefit immensely from participating in a solar program and sharing that generation locally. Imagine the marketing potential.”

Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades by Mark S. Friedman

OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The American Decades, the second volume of Herman K. Trabish’s retelling of oil’s history in fiction, picks up where the first book in the series, OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction, left off. The new book is an engrossing, informative and entertaining tale of the Roaring 20s, World War II and the Cold War. You don’t have to know anything about the first historical fiction’s adventures set between the Civil War, when oil became a major commodity, and World War I, when it became a vital commodity, to enjoy this new chronicle of the U.S. emergence as a world superpower and a world oil power.

As the new book opens, Lefash, a minor character in the first book, witnesses the role Big Oil played in designing the post-Great War world at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Unjustly implicated in a murder perpetrated by Big Oil agents, LeFash takes the name Livingstone and flees to the U.S. to clear himself. Livingstone’s quest leads him through Babe Ruth’s New York City and Al Capone’s Chicago into oil boom Oklahoma. Stymied by oil and circumstance, Livingstone marries, has a son and eventually, surprisingly, resolves his grievances with the murderer and with oil.

In the new novel’s second episode the oil-and-auto-industry dynasty from the first book re-emerges in the charismatic person of Victoria Wade Bridger, “the woman everybody loved.” Victoria meets Saudi dynasty founder Ibn Saud, spies for the State Department in the Vichy embassy in Washington, D.C., and – for profound and moving personal reasons – accepts a mission into the heart of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Underlying all Victoria’s travels is the struggle between the allies and axis for control of the crucial oil resources that drove World War II.

As the Cold War begins, the novel’s third episode recounts the historic 1951 moment when Britain’s MI-6 handed off its operations in Iran to the CIA, marking the end to Britain’s dark manipulations and the beginning of the same work by the CIA. But in Trabish’s telling, the covert overthrow of Mossadeq in favor of the ill-fated Shah becomes a compelling romance and a melodramatic homage to the iconic “Casablanca” of Bogart and Bergman.

Monty Livingstone, veteran of an oil field youth, European WWII combat and a star-crossed post-war Berlin affair with a Russian female soldier, comes to 1951 Iran working for a U.S. oil company. He re-encounters his lost Russian love, now a Soviet agent helping prop up Mossadeq and extend Mother Russia’s Iranian oil ambitions. The reunited lovers are caught in a web of political, religious and Cold War forces until oil and power merge to restore the Shah to his future fate. The romance ends satisfyingly, America and the Soviet Union are the only forces left on the world stage and ambiguity is resolved with the answer so many of Trabish’s characters ultimately turn to: Oil.

Commenting on a recent National Petroleum Council report calling for government subsidies of the fossil fuels industries, a distinguished scholar said, “It appears that the whole report buys these dubious arguments that the consumer of energy is somehow stupid about energy…” Trabish’s great and important accomplishment is that you cannot read his emotionally engaging and informative tall tales and remain that stupid energy consumer. With our world rushing headlong toward Peak Oil and epic climate change, the OIL IN THEIR BLOOD series is a timely service as well as a consummate literary performance.

Review of OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, The Story of Our Addiction by Mark S. Friedman

"...ours is a culture of energy illiterates." (Paul Roberts, THE END OF OIL)

OIL IN THEIR BLOOD, a superb new historical fiction by Herman K. Trabish, addresses our energy illiteracy by putting the development of our addiction into a story about real people, giving readers a chance to think about how our addiction happened. Trabish's style is fine, straightforward storytelling and he tells his stories through his characters.

The book is the answer an oil family's matriarch gives to an interviewer who asks her to pass judgment on the industry. Like history itself, it is easier to tell stories about the oil industry than to judge it. She and Trabish let readers come to their own conclusions.

She begins by telling the story of her parents in post-Civil War western Pennsylvania, when oil became big business. This part of the story is like a John Ford western and its characters are classic American melodramatic heroes, heroines and villains.

In Part II, the matriarch tells the tragic story of the second generation and reveals how she came to be part of the tales. We see oil become an international commodity, traded on Wall Street and sought from London to Baku to Mesopotamia to Borneo. A baseball subplot compares the growth of the oil business to the growth of baseball, a fascinating reflection of our current president's personal career.

There is an unforgettable image near the center of the story: International oil entrepreneurs talk on a Baku street. This is Trabish at his best, portraying good men doing bad and bad men doing good, all laying plans for wealth and power in the muddy, oily alley of a tiny ancient town in the middle of everywhere. Because Part I was about triumphant American heroes, the tragedy here is entirely unexpected, despite Trabish's repeated allusions to other stories (Casey At The Bat, Hamlet) that do not end well.

In the final section, World War I looms. Baseball takes a back seat to early auto racing and oil-fueled modernity explodes. Love struggles with lust. A cavalry troop collides with an army truck. Here, Trabish has more than tragedy in mind. His lonely, confused young protagonist moves through the horrible destruction of the Romanian oilfields only to suffer worse and worse horrors, until--unexpectedly--he finds something, something a reviewer cannot reveal. Finally, the question of oil must be settled, so the oil industry comes back into the story in a way that is beyond good and bad, beyond melodrama and tragedy.

Along the way, Trabish gives readers a greater awareness of oil and how we became addicted to it. Awareness, Paul Roberts said in THE END OF OIL, "...may be the first tentative step toward building a more sustainable energy economy. Or it may simply mean that when our energy system does begin to fail, and we begin to lose everything that energy once supplied, we won't be so surprised."

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